In Praise Of Budget Deficits

With the presentation of his 2020 budget, Donald Trump has been getting a ton of grief over the large current and projected future budget deficits. While his budget shows the deficit coming down, this is due to large cuts to programs that middle income and lower income people depend upon, like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. His projections for falling deficits also depend on assuming a faster growth rate than just about anyone thinks is possible. So realistically, we are looking at a story of large deficits for the indefinite future.

While this is supposed to be really bad, people who pay attention to economic data may think otherwise. If we look at the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections for the unemployment rates for 2018, 2019, and 2020, from 2017, before the tax cut was passed, they were respectively, 4.2 percent, 4.4 percent, and 4.7 percent. If we look at CBO's latest projections for these three years, they are 3.9 percent (actual) 3.5 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. The difference between the latest projections and the pre-tax cut projections imply a gain of more than 2 million in employment in each of these years.

These two million additional people being employed is a big deal not only for these workers and their families but for tens of millions of other workers who have more bargaining power as a result of a tighter labor market. And, we're supposed to think this is a bad thing because of the deficit and debt? Tell the children of the people who are now working because of the larger deficit or whose parents have higher pay how the debt is a burden on them.

Of course, giving a big tax cut to corporations and rich people was just about the worst way imaginable to boost the economy. The promised investment boom is not happening. The boost is coming because rich people are spending a portion of their tax cuts and their increased share buybacks and dividends. But we could have also given the money to middle-income and lower-income people who would have been happy to spend it as well.

Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor ...
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Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People", "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive", "The United States Since 1980," Social Security: The Phony Crisis", and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer."

His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and theNew York Daily News. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.

Dean has written several books, his latest being Getting Back to Full Employment: a Better Bargain for Working People. His other books includeThe End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, Taking Economics Seriously (MIT Press), which thinks through what we might gain if we took the ideological blinders off of basic economic principles, and False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press, 2010) about what caused - and how to fix - the current economic crisis. In 2009, he wrote Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press), which chronicled the growth and collapse of the stock and housing bubbles and explained how policy blunders and greed led to the catastrophic - but completely predictable - market meltdowns. He also wrote a chapter ("From Financial Crisis to Opportunity") inThinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era (Progressive Ideas Network, 2009). His previous books include The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006), and Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press, 1999). His book Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index (editor, M.E. Sharpe, 1997) was a winner of a Choice Book Award as one of the outstanding academic books of the year.

Among his numerous articles are "The Benefits of a Financial Transactions Tax," Tax Notes 121, no. 4, 2008; "Are Protective Labor Market Institutions at the Root of Unemployment? A Critical Review of the Evidence," (with David R. Howell, Andrew Glyn, and John Schmitt), Capitalism and Society 2, no. 1, 2007; "Asset Returns and Economic Growth," (with Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2005; "Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2004; "Medicare Choice Plus: The Solution to the Long-Term Deficit Problem," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2004; The Benefits of Full Employment (also with Jared Bernstein), Economic Policy Institute, 2004; "Professional Protectionists: The Gains From Free Trade in Highly Paid Professional Services," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2003; and "The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2002.

Dean previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council. He was the author of the weekly online commentary on economic reporting, the Economic Reporting Review (ERR), from 1996 - 2006.